Many athletes in the various major leagues excel at more than one sport. For example, basketball star Dave DeBusschere of the Detroit Pistons and New York Knicks also payed major-league baseball with the Chicago White Sox. Jackie Robinson was a college All-American football player in addition to becoming the major league’s first black baseball player. No one, however, was as versatile as Lionel “Big Train” Conacher, who played in the National Hockey League for several years.
Lionel was an outstanding baseball player with the old Toronto Maple Leafs of the Triple-A International League. Ty Cobb once watched him play and said he could make it into the big leagues. In addition, Conacher was the Canadian light-heavyweight boxing champion and once sparred a couple of rounds with Jack Dempsey. Big Train also played pro football with the Toronto Argonauts. And he was a dandy lacrosse player.
As a young man Conacher was constantly busy with athletics. Once he played a baseball game and tripled home the winning run. Then he raced to the other side of town to play in a lacrosse match. When he arrived, the game was already in progress and his team was losing, 3-0. Conacher put on a uniform and joined the action. He scored four goals, got an assist for another, and his team won.
Because his family was too poor to buy skates, Big Train didn’t learn to skate until he was sixteen years old. Only six years later he became a pro hockey player.
From The Giant Book of More Strange But True Sports Stories by Howard Liss. Illustrations by Joe Mathieu.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lionel_Conacher
Conacher went into politics after retiring from sports and went after corruption in boxing–which, being a former champion, he probably knew a lot about. He died from a massive heart attack playing in the annual Parliament baseball game, the day before his daughter’s college graduation.
To be fair, aren’t hockey and boxing the same thing other than sticks & skates?